Found an old Raspberry Pi - not sure what model it is

[Cromulent]

I was looking around in the cellar yesterday and found an old Raspberry Pi with an SD card in it. I immediately put the latest version of Raspbian on the SD card, but I can't for the life of me remember what model the Raspberry Pi is.

Is there any way to find out the model number without turning it on? It says copyright 2011, so I think it is the Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+. If I need to turn it on I can always take the power supply out of my current Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and use that, but I'm still not sure how to find out what model it is from within Raspbian.

Could anyone let me know how to find out this information?

Thanks.

[klricks]

https://raspi.tv/rpifamily

[Cromulent]

https://raspi.tv/rpifamily

Thanks for the link. It looks like it is a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B. That is useful to know.

[W. H. Heydt]

https://raspi.tv/rpifamily

Thanks for the link. It looks like it is a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B. That is useful to know.

There are several minor variants of the Model B. The original ones had a 70mA polyfuse for each USB port. Those were replaced with zero Ohm resistor. Eventually, they were removed altogether.

[jahboater]

If I need to turn it on I can always take the power supply out of my current Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and use that, but I'm still not sure how to find out what model it is from within Raspbian.

Its in "/proc/device-tree/model", for example:-

Code: Select all

pi@Pi3:~ $ cat /proc/device-tree/model; echo
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Plus Rev 1.3
pi@Pi3:~ $ 

[bensimmo]

Easy method is big SD card on the back or small SD card.
(I.e. If you need to put your 3B+ card in an adaptor to use it, it the original B or A Pi's

Small and it B+ onwards and will look similar to your 3B+ in shape.
Square then it's an A+
Small rectangle, then it's a Zero series

Another method is to type
pinout
at a terminal and it should give you what type of pi it is.

[hippy]

My aide memoire for visually identifying Pi boards at a distance -

Code: Select all

A        : RCA, No RJ45
B        : RCA, RJ45
A+       : Square board

B+       : Large Pi logo to left of SoC
2B       : Small Pi Logo to left of SoC
3B       : Pi logo above SoC 
3B+      : Silver embossed Pi logo

Zero 1.2 : No CSI connector
Zero 1.3 : CSI, HDMI text
Zero W   : CSI, no HDMI text

CM       : Two chips
CM3      : One chip

It's not so easy to identify specific variants of each from a distance. The difficult one is distinguishing a BCM2836 2B from the BCM2837 version.

[W. H. Heydt]

Now that the substantive issues have been covered... Did anyone else find the juxtaposition of "old" and "Raspberry Pi" in the thread title a bit dislconcerting? After all, no commercially sold Pi is as much as 6.5 years old....

[LTolledo]

Now that the substantive issues have been covered... Did anyone else find the juxtaposition of "old" and "Raspberry Pi" in the thread title a bit dislconcerting? After all, no commercially sold Pi is as much as 6.5 years old....

Somebody once told me that in electronics world, anything past 5 years is considered old ...

...but age doesn't matter.... right?

[W. H. Heydt]

Now that the substantive issues have been covered... Did anyone else find the juxtaposition of "old" and "Raspberry Pi" in the thread title a bit dislconcerting? After all, no commercially sold Pi is as much as 6.5 years old....

Somebody once told me that in electronics world, anything past 5 years is considered old ...

...but age doesn't matter.... right?

When I was born (1949) there were no commercial computers. My sister--also a programmer--used to point out that when she was born (1943), programming wasn't even science fiction.

"Old" is relative.

[hippy]

Did anyone else find the juxtaposition of "old" and "Raspberry Pi" in the thread title a bit dislconcerting? After all, no commercially sold Pi is as much as 6.5 years old....

I just took that as "not recent", "one of the earlier ones". I would refer to original A and B models as an old Pi. Some might consider "old" to extend all the way up to include a 2B, even a 3B.

When a new model of car comes out it's not uncommon to find the previous model referred to as the older or old model, just days later.